After the storms, the county counts its losses.When a man is found drowned in a retention basin after a night of heavy rain, Deputy Laura Bennett files the report the way she always does. Accidental death. Weather-related. Unfortunate, but familiar.Then it happens again. And again.As storms roll through the county with increasing frequency, bodies begin to surface along the same flood-control system, retention basins, drainage channels, pedestrian cut-throughs built to manage risk, not eliminate it. Each death is ruled an accident. Each fits the math. Each falls within what the system considers acceptable.But patterns don't need witnesses to exist.Bennett begins to notice what others overlook: the timing, the locations, the way fear does the work that hands never have to. Someone is exploiting the margins, standing just close enough, at the right moment, letting infrastructure and weather finish what intent begins.As pressure builds and storms grow harder to predict, Bennett is forced into a confrontation not just with a killer, but with the quiet logic of a system designed to absorb loss without ever asking why it keeps happening.The Floodplain is a tense, grounded crime novel about modern risk, institutional blindness, and the dangerous space between accident and intent, where no one technically does anything wrong, and people still die.